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MIDWOR-LIFE CONSORTIUM MEETING M24

10-12-2017

MIDWOR-LIFE is a project co-funded by LIFE+ programme that aims to reduce the impact on the environment, human health and worker safety, of current Durable Water and Oil Repellents (DWOR) used in the textile industry and their alternatives, by analyzing their environmental impact and technical functionalities.

On October 3rd, a consortium meeting of MIDWOR-LIFE project was held in Città Studi facilities in Biella, organized by the Italian partner Pointex, with the participation from all project partners.

The meeting began with the presentations of the progress and outcomes obtained for each action during the last 6 months. Alongside the up-to-date results, each partner also presented their proposed action plan for the coming months. After each action presentation, a discussion was opened among all the participants to evaluate and propose guidelines for next steps.

Main results for this semester are the release of deliverable B1.1: “Report on the pre-industrial applications and characterization of DWOR and alternatives” and the addition of three new alternative Durable Water and Oil Repellent (DWOR) products to be studied during the project, the internal publication of deliverable C3.1 “Preliminary report on cost-efficiency methodology and system defined”, the progress on the environmental impact model development and the layout description of the web tool.

The most interesting result from deliverable B1.1 is the very good water and oil repellence demonstrated by perfluorosilicone product, before and after ageing, and in some cases, with highest values than C8 chemistry. Perfluorosilicone combines a water and oil repellence property. Moreover, this technology includes the anchorage of the fluorocarbon chains to the substrate via the homogeneous distribution of the siloxane. On the other hand, the Silicone product is highly effective on nonwovens but do not present oil repellence since its surface energy is higher than the surface energy of oil. Fluorocarbon-based chemistries and sol-gel are also discussed in the complete report available on the project's website.

The methodology presented in deliverable C3.1 provides a Life Cycle Cost (LCC) framework to estimate the economic impacts of the application of conventional and alternative DWORs in textile finishing processes.

The web tool which will be developed within the project, aims to provide the textile industry with a user-friendly tool where the results from the project will be summarized for their use in comparing conventional DWORs and their alternatives.

Next step is the industrial demonstration. This action comprises the industrial-scale application of the selected DWORs on to the fabrics by several finishing processes and the subsequent technical performance, environmental analysis, risk and Life Cycle assessments for the resulting treated fabrics.

Demonstration at industrial level will be performed at six textile finishing companies, 2 from Spain, 2 from Czech Republic and 2 from Italy.

During the course from the last meeting, several stakeholders of high relevance and several SMEs have expressed their interest on the results of the project.

MIDWOR-LIFE is a European project, co-funded by the European Union under the LIFE+ Financial Instrument within the axe Environment Policy and Governance and under the Grant Agreement n. LIFE14 ENV/ES/000670.

AEI TÈXTILS, a non-profit organization representing the Catalan technical textiles cluster is the coordinator of the project. The consortium is completed by another 5 partners: 3 research institutes/technological centres from Spain: LEITAT Technological Center (member of Tecnio network), CETIM and the Institute of Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia from CSIC plus 2 technical textile clusters, CS-POINTEX from Italy and CLUTEX from the Czech Republic.

MIDWOR-LIFE project is an example of collaboration between clusters, with the aim to improve competitiveness of their members, SMEs in the technical textiles sector.